Paris under the Commune eBook

It was not enough that men should be riddled with
balls and torn to pieces by shells. The women
are also seized with a strange enthusiasm in their
turn, and they too fall on the battle-field, victims
of a terrible heroism. What extraordinary beings
are these who exchange the needle for the needle-gun,
the broom for the bayonet, who quit their children
that they may die by the sides of their husbands or
lovers? Amazons of the rabble, magnificent and
abject, something between Penthesilea and Theroigne
de Mericourt. There they are seen to pass as cantinieres,
among those who go forth to fight. The men are
furious, the women are ferocious,—­nothing
can appal, nothing discourage them. At Neuilly,
a vivandiere is wounded in the head; she turns back
a moment to staunch the blood, then returns to her
post of danger. Another, in the 61st Battalion,
boasts of having killed three gardiens de la paix[51]
and several gendarmes. On the plain of
Chatillon a woman joins a group of National Guards,
takes her stand amongst them, loads her gun, fires,
re-loads and fires again, without the slightest interruption.
She is the last to retire, and even then turns back
again and again to fire. A cantiniere
of the 68th Battalion was killed by a fragment of shell
which broke the little spirit-barrel she carried, and
sent the splinters into her stomach. After the
engagement of the 3rd of April, nine bodies were brought
to the mairie of Vaugirard. The poor women
of the quarter crowd there, chattering and groaning,
to look for husbands, brothers and son’s.
They tear a dingy lantern from each other, and put
it close to the pale faces of the dead, amongst whom
they find the body of a young woman literally riddled
with shot. What means the wild rage that seizes
upon these furies? Are they conscious of the crimes
they commit; do they understand the cause for which
they die? Yesterday, in a shop of the Rue de
Montreuil, a woman entered with her gun on her shoulder
and her bayonet covered with blood. “Wouldn’t
you do better to stay at home and wash your brats?”
said an indignant neighbour. Whereupon arose a
furious altercation, the virago working herself into
such a fury that she sprang upon her adversary, and
bit her violently in the throat, then withdrew a few
steps, seized her gun, and was going to fire, when
she suddenly turned pale, her weapon fell from her
hands, and she sank back dead. In her wild passion
she had broken a blood vessel. Such are the women
of the people in this terrible year of 1871.
It has its cantinieres as ’93 had its
tricoteuses,[52] but the cantinieres are preferable,
for the horrible in them partakes of a savage grandeur.
Fighting as they are against brothers and kinsfolk,
they are revolting, but against a foreign enemy, they
would have been sublime.